Steam Next Fest: What've You Played?

So many demos, so little time. With hundreds of demos available in this Steam Next Fest event until just June 22, I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on what I've tried thus far and encourage the rest of you to do the same.

And keep in mind, all of these are just demos in various stages of pre-release. None of this is a judgment on how good or bad the final product may be. Just trying to provide an outlet for people to discuss what they think may be worth checking out or what may not be worth the time at this point.

Okinawa Rush - Demo Rating: 4 / 5- Very fast-paced brawler with some fighting game elements mixed in. The combat occasionally feels a little too frantic to be manageable, but it feels great overall. The voice acting and writing are hit and miss, but it has a great hyper-violent look and solid aesthetic.

Heaven Dust 2 - Demo Rating: 3/5 - A solid isometric Resident Evil with a lot of potential. The writing/translation could use some work as there is a "puzzle" almost immediately encountered that is nearly impossible to understand without luck (just flip the light switch in the hallway a bunch until a secret passage opens). Aside from that though, this does a great job at imitating classic RE.

Ys IX: Monstrum Nox - Demo Rating: 4/5 - Ys is a pretty well known quantity at this point and this has been out on PS4 for a while now, but Ys VIII was incredible and I've been hyped for the PC release. This is more of just a PSA for the Ys fans or folks that are Ys curious that there is a demo available.

Chenso Club - Demo Rating: 2/5 - An action-platformer focused on clearing a sequence of small combat arenas. I don't really think the combat is good enough to be the primary focus, but there are elements of the style and presentation that I do like.

Mayhem Brawler - Demo Rating: 4/5 - Brawler with visuals and comic-book presentation very reminiscent of the recent Streets of Rage 4. The combat is definitely not as refined as SoR4 and the writing can be a little grating in spots, but there's definitely some potential here.

Terra Nil: This was the thing that most jumped out at me, since I've been playing a lot of Dorfromantik over the last couple of months. The demo was relatively short (25-30 minutes for me), but I think it did a good job of showing off the mechanics and showed potential for some really interesting puzzles in mid- and late-game. There were three phases: first for greening the landscape, then for adding biomes to the green areas, and finally you have to pack it all up to leave a pristine area. This final phase was the most intriguing to me, since I had to place the recycling towers along an efficient path to avoid running out of resources before I finished. There was also a mechanic with temperature and humidity that I didn't notice until I'd almost finished; I want to play the demo a second time now to experiment with that. Overall, I recommend at least checking it out, if for no other reason than its minimal time investment to get a solid impression.

Tried a few demos and the only game that led me to wish list it so far was Unsighted. Isometric 2D action game with some real Hyperlight Drifter vibes and some extra RPGish systems thrown in. It might not have the "elegance" of Hyperlight but I really dug the feel of the combat and movement at least.

Didn't get a chance to try out the new My Time at Sandrock (Portia) game yet, but I think it will be in early access for a while anyway.

I have a bunch of these downloaded but haven't gotten to dig into any of them yet!

I'm biased, but LOVE 3 ain't bad. It's also a short and sweet demo.

I'm loving all the demos, so far I've played:

Unpacking (interesting storytelling game where you learn by unpacking boxes through someone's life): 5/5, no bugs I found, short and sweet demo for a game I was super interested in from the trailer.

Bear & Breakfast (a bear builds and runs a bed & breakfast): 3/5, unfortunately riddled with bugs. I did manage to get to the end of the demo where it seems like it's sort of a freeplay thing, but I think guests stopped requesting stays so I only had one guest. The guest often floated around and at one point was just a hat, which was funny. There's also quite a few bugs with the room building. However, I'm still very interested. The art is great and I really like the premise so far. There's lots to unlock in the demo, but with the bugs, I decided to wait and play the full release.

Terra Nil (reverse city builder puzzler): 4/5, interesting, took me a couple retries (one of which I ended up with 2 of the little recycle boat drones and somehow managed to get them both back to the airship to finish). Seems more puzzle than I usually like, but I'm intrigued. Super pretty and the demo is very robust.

Blooming Business Casino (casino tycoon with cute animals): 2/5, It's got a very retro funky style. It was pretty buggy and weird the first time I played it yesterday, but it got patched today and seems to actually have a completion now. Demo is pretty shallow and I had a lot of trouble with placing things. Couldn't fire staff, some of the dialogue boxes talked about hiring people I couldn't hire from the usual menu (figured out bouncer by hiring via entrance, no clue about pit boss though). Camera mode lets you fly around and clip through any and everything. I am unfortunately not that interested anymore. Tycoon/management games are my bread and butter, but the style didn't land as much as the Bear & Breakfast game above.

These next two were technically from the Guerilla Collective, but they're also demos!

Potion Craft (super stylistic alchemy creation/selling): 5/5, I'm pretty excited for this. It's got a great style, the demo was super smooth and I didn't find any bugs. Trying to get to new potions could be frustrating, but they've got some upcoming features they map out when the demo ends that I think will help out. It's got some interesting "choices" you can make: help the guy who wants to poison a person and your rep goes down. Lower rep means more customers looking to do bad things with your potions. Or, don't fulfill his request and your rep goes up. Higher rep means more people looking to do good. I didn't figure this out at first, but I think it's kinda neat. There's no time mechanics, so people will sit around in the shop for ages until you get their potion. The only limit there is ingredients. I ended up putting a couple hours into this.

Despot's Game (pixel rouge-like dungeon crawler where you gear puny humans to kill and be killed for you): 5/5, this looks pretty cool. It definitely has the RNG element where sometimes you get a mob in a room that will annihilate all your humans at once and you have to start a new run. No bugs I found. There's a hunger mechanic which seems a little counter-intuitive to the main game premise of having an army, so I'll be interested to see how that gets balanced. It feels like the kind of game where you have to very carefully balance exploring to get more gear/potentially (always) lose more humans and just plowing through to the next level. The humor is just a tad obnoxious, but I still put 2 hours in playing the same parts over and over. I wish there was a bit more variance in gear, if just for the demo. I seem to get the same stuff quite a lot, while I've only seen the pretzel/other throwers once or twice. There's also a cool mechanic where having variety in a single class (so 3 types of the tank 'class') gives you special abilities. It seems to stack quite a bit, however, this also means you have tons of guys out and have to somehow feed all of them (there is a pit in each room where you can throw humans to get food, as once they hit a rock bottom level, they can't move). Still, I'm interested to see this one when it's done.

Wartales - Essentially an open-world RPG but with a different presentation. You start as a group of four fighters, each a different class, and you crawl across a massive screen of small villages, farmland, dense forest, and whatever else finds you. The battles themselves are tactical and making to something like Divinity Original Sin 2. Overall it's somehow difficult and calming and I am supremely curious how this one winds up.

The Immortal Mayor- A worker management game with an old God game twist. Instead of being the invisible hand of God, this one gives you the powers of a true God. You level up alongside your settlement and can ask assistance from other gods or bestow a blessing on your minions. The look of this one also stands out among the typical worker sim genre and I'm hoping it comes together.

Let's Build a Zoo- If you want to dive into management games but the idea of patching together every tree, flower, fence, bench, and whatever else in your zoo then this might be for you. While keeping a lot of the deeper ideas you'll find in something like Planet Zoo, this one keeps a lot of the more time-consuming aspects at arm's length. I wonder if the deeper systems will chase away those attracted to the bright colors and adorable designs or if it's the right balance for newbies.

Tried out some more this evening.

Dodgeball Academia - Demo Rating: 4/5 - The art and presentation in this game are absolutely fantastic. Sports RPG is a great concept that should really be explored more often, but this demo leaves me wondering if there's enough depth in the actual dodgeball to keep me interested for the length of the full game.

Terra Nil - Demo Rating: 5/5 - Extremely zen twist on the genre that I think we're calling "resource management sims" these days, sitting in some sort of middle ground between Factorio and Dorfromantik. I could've kept playing this indefinitely, and I'll almost certainly end up staying up far too late a few nights playing this once it's released.

Death Trash - Demo Rating: 3/5 - Solid post-apocalyptic action RPG with a great grimy pixel aesthetic. The skills available seem like they could open up some diverse options for solving problems as you progress, but it's hard to know for sure if that will come together well in the full game. Combat is relatively slow and methodical, but this seems like the sort of RPG where the non-combat options are what could make it interesting.

Frontier Hunter: Eza's Wheel of Fortune - Demo Rating: 1/5 - A Metroidvania where you play as a sexy anime lady adventurer that is also a Twitch streamer. Looks bad and plays worse.

Project Haven - Demo Rating: 3/5 - A lot of Jagged Aliance vibes from this one. The tactical strategy gameplay, akin to classic X-COM but with free movement and free aim, is a little buggy at the moment but seems like it has potential. The thing that really drags this game down at the moment are the extremely generic urban cyberpunk characters and abysmal writing. There is a disclaimer that some of the voice acting is placeholder, but I'm not sure if I trust any writer that thought a "deez nuts" line was OK even as just a placeholder.

Idol Manager - Demo Rating: 3/5 - Not really up to the standard of Kairosoft joints, but it doesn't seem terrible either. This game has kinda fallen into the awkward middle-ground of being a little too active to be an idle game but not quite enough to really keep you engaged (however some of that may be due to things left out of the demo).

I've played a few so far, still some I'd like to check out but parsing through the collection Steam has is easier said than done. That said:

LOVE 3 - I really enjoyed that first LOVE game back when I tried it out, back around 2015 or so, but never took much to kuso for some reason. 3 hits just about the right level of familiar territory for me, though. It's still a simplistic platformer, although the environmental art has gotten really nice, making ample use of the limits of the series' stylistic design. It keeps up a pretty good variety between its levels, although I think some of them are a little too fast (I suppose it's just an issue of me being too stubborn to use the slow-mo mode, which is a nice addition.) I'll definitely have to keep an eye on it.

Unpacking - From this game's E3 trailer, I wasn't entirely sure how much I would be interested. The pixel art is really lovely (and certainly couldn't have been an easy task, given just how many objects are in this game), but I wasn't sure it would actually be especially enjoyable to play. Turns out, it is pretty enjoyable, though. A good variety of stuff, all fitting well but not quite perfectly into the environment, requiring just a little bit of thought and settling. Some aspects of it were a bit frustrating, I found myself emptying out entire boxes at once and then sorting the items inside, and occasionally I would put things into a place I thought was perfect for them only for the game to insist they go elsewhere, but nothing too bothersome.

Unbeatable [white label] - Okay, this one's not technically part of Next Fest, I don't think, but it's a fairly recent demo and it was shown at E3 so I'm counting it. This game is pretty fucking stylish, looks really great even if some of the effects they use are a tad overkill (the VHS one in particular makes things kinda hard to process.) The music selection is pretty good, in terms of both quality and variety, although something about the vocals feels a touch off at times. I was partially worried that the two-button design would make for a really easy rhythm game, but they seem to be doing a pretty good job of keeping it engaging.

Patrick's Parabox - A pretty clever concept, a sokoban with a gimmick centered on recursion, and levels that are designed pretty well around them. I almost feel like this is another Baba is You situation where the game is too clever for its own good, with there being a point where I can't quite process what I'm doing anymore, so finding the solution at times feels more like doing the motions or getting lucky than understanding the game. I don't know if the full game would be for me, but damn if I don't respect it.

UnMetal - The humor in this game could have been unbelievably grating, so the fact that it's genuinely pretty funny is more-than-welcome in my book. The stealth mechanics don't seem especially interesting just going off of what's in the demo, but there's very clearly care put into interactivity and having funny shit to say when the player goofs off. I think I actually have a previous game by this developer somewhere in the recesses of my library, maybe I should give it a shot some time.

I played through the Norco demo a couple of nights ago (it snuck out a day early for the festival if you were paying attention.) I have been waiting for this since it was announced and so far it is as fantastic as I'd hoped.

Got around to playing a few and will probably try out a few more over the weekend

Cris Tales - A turn-based RPG with timing combat in the tradition of Paper Mario centered around a young girl with time powers. The art style is great and looks really slick in motion. The combat in the demo seems solid and there's some good ideas about how your time powers can be used in combat; a bit more readability in when to block attacks would be nice since some attacks don't have a clear point of contact but the timing windows feel generous enough to not have this be too big an issue. The pacing of what's in the demo seems a little odd, it feels like there should be just a little bit more exposition or that there's missing intermediate scenes. Might very well be that they cut things out from the demo! Also they do a pretty hard left/right pan when 2 characters are talking which is annoying to me, voice acting is solid though! Might very well check out the full game.

Dodgeball Academia - I've always liked the Sports-RPG and wish it happened more often so this was fun to see. They change up the combat in the demo enough that I can see it getting pretty chaotic down the road, though one boss(?) fight in particular had me thinking that if the AI is tuned poorly to be too 'good' then fights could get tedious really fast.

Unpacking - I don't know if there's more to this game but what's already there is enough to sell me on it. Just a really neat little game to let me live out my aspirations of having a clean room that I can't fulfill in real life.

Little Witch in the Woods - A very charming game about just relaxing in a forest, helping out townsfolk and generally doing witch-y things. Really like the slice-of-life vibe, very reminiscent of the anime Flying Witch. Some awkwardness in the dialogue at parts probably from the translation from Korean but I already love how much of a charming idiot the main character is. Animations are very charming but maybe take slightly too long, could see it becoming annoying after a long long while.

Unbeatable [white label] - A rhythm game with a story maybe? The characters seem like they could be pretty fun. The rhythm game part is solid, though the action is just unreadable enough that sightreading is more challenging than it should be. Would definitely get better with more practice but there's just a bit too much going on visually during gameplay. The charting also seems confusingly done in certain sections of some songs. Otherwise it's a nice change of pace to have this sort of music in a rhythm game, might keep up with this.

TOEM - A photography game set against the backdrop of a youthful journey. This is probably my favourite of the bunch. It's got a neat isometric 3D style that really works for what it wants to do. Even just within the small slice of the demo I found lots of fun things to take photos of and a whole bunch of quirky, likeable characters. Highly recommend you check this one out, definitely going to pick up the full game when it releases.

So far I've only played the Carrier Command 2 demo. Very rough, but still very promising sequel to one of my favorite 80s games. The issues I encountered all seemed very solvable. The graphics style wasn't great, but worked well enough, and there were still some really striking imagery as you looked through your 32X artillery gun scope and saw distant headlights and tracer rounds on a distant island.

There's an accessibility option to just put stuff wherever you want. I know once I finish the 'puzzle' run of the game, I'll probably go back through and put stuff wherever.

I've downloaded half a dozen demos. Here's what I've played so far.

The Fermi Paradox: I love science fiction. In particular, I am utterly fascinated by two concepts. The first is deep time, which can be used to describe either the distant past or the distant future. I'm currently listening to an audiobook by Alistair Reynolds which takes place six million years from now. Another sci-fi concept I love to think about is the so-called Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox basically says that any sufficiently advanced species, even without the possibility of faster-than-light travel, ought to be able to colonize the galaxy within a few million years of developing spaceflight. So...where is everyone?

The Fermi Paradox is a narrative strategy game. You don't play a single civilization. Instead, you have a god's view of the galaxy as a whole. The demo starts with two species, the Humans and the Prun. Each species has a set of stats to keep track of, like population and pop growth, resources, current tech level, how devastating a potential war would be, and how close society is to dystopia or utopia. Events happen and you collect "synthesis" to advance time. There is always a chance that a random event will occur, and when that happens you have three options. In general, the best option costs synthesis points, the worst option awards synthesis points, and the middle option costs and awards no points. Sometimes, you'll want to allow a devastating war to happen just to get the points to fix something else down the line.

I played through the demo twice. On my first playthrough, the Prun sent a colony ship to Earth. By the time they arrived, the Humans had wiped themselves out and the Prun had done the same. The few remaining Prun established a colony on Earth that eventually failed. A third species, which you can choose to guide from the earliest days of sapience up through the ages also wiped itself out. The galaxy was dead. My second playthrough was a bit happier. Different events occurred, but when the Prun ship made it to Earth, I didn't have enough points to choose the "good" option of peaceful communication. The ship left Earth and humans never even knew it had been there. The resource and population mechanics are a little sparse at the moment, but this game has beautiful art and music, and I can definitely see myself playing through it multiple times just to experience various stories.

Dread Templar: This is a fast-paced Doom-style game. A killer soundtrack, puzzles and color-coded doors. You like katanas? What if you could combine your dual katanas and then throw them for a powerful attack that pierces multiple demons?! Hell yeah! It doesn't feel as good as Doom, of course, but if you're in the mood for a cheap demon-killing romp, this one seems alright.

Song of Iron: This is a side-scrolling slash-em-up. You play a Viking warrior avenging your family. You have a bow, an ax, and a shield. Getting swarmed by just a few enemies can be deadly, so the game requires smart use of your abilities like blocking, kicking an enemy away, and rolling past an enemy. Your shield can break, so you need to pick up the shields of fallen enemies. You can pick up one-handed or two-handed axes. Despite being a side-scroller, the game does a lot with foreground and background environments and shadows to make a really cool looking experience.

Grime - Scrolling through I noticed it had "Metroidvania", "Souls-Like" and "2D" tags so I was in immediately. The setting is pretty drab, kinda reminds me of Oddworld since you play as this creature making your way through this world. It has an interesting parry system that allows you to build up a meter to regain health. Otherwise combat is pretty straight forward - I got a standard sword, dual blades, and a large axe but stuck with the sword for the majority of the demo.

UnMetal - Only heard about this from the E3 wrap up when Jeff mentioned it so I gave it a whirl. I thought the jokes landed and the MSG-ness was a lot of fun. There were a couple of times I thought I punched an enemy but it didn't register, but luckily it's not too punishing.

Unsighted - Isometric, Soul-Like in the vain of Hyper Light Drifter. Not sure how far I got in the demo, but I wasn't a huge fan of the enemy movement. Based on the trailer it seems like there's some ranged combat/other things that are interesting but this one didn't grab me.

Death Trash - Longest demo I played and also my favorite. Isometric post-apocalyptic RPG with cool pixel art. The combat is fun and challenging, but the controller layout seems a little weird (like it's made with keyboard/mouse in mind, which is fair) and the I wish the quests had markers/map could be marked. Otherwise a fun time!

I played Terra Nil and Lake. I like both enough that I'll probably end up buying them when they are released.

In general, demos making a comeback the last little while is a great thing. Back in the day, demos were my number one way of trying new games and I probably ended up buying far more games because of a well done demo than I ever did from some expensive advertising campaign.

@raleighen: I just spent 2 hours playing the Potion Craft demo. Probably the best thing I've played during this event.

@chaser324: As long as you download them they can be played anytime I have demos from last year that still work even though they can't be downloaded anymore.

I played a couple more games.

Deathtrap Dungeon The Golden Room: This is apparently based on an old choose-your-own-adventure style book and is an FMV game with charmingly mediocre sets and acting. The demo is very short, taking only a few minutes to get through. I might pick it up if it's super cheap one day as something a bit different. I have always wanted more fantastical FMV games.

PotionCraft: You're a young alchemist setting up shop in a new town. The gameplay consists of mixing different plants together to create new potions. Each potion starts in the center of a large "map" that is mostly invisible to you. Each item you add changes the direction that the potion moves, and you need to get it to certain points in order to unlock different types of potions. The more efficient path you can make, the fewer resources you have to use for each potion. NPCs come into the shop and make requests. Fortunately, time doesn't pass while you're mixing ingredients, so you can take your time. There are the basics like health, mana, and poison. There's a rudimentary reputation system, too. Providing a villager with a poison to deal with a rat problem will earn you a little bit of gold and increase your reputation because you provided him with what he wanted. Providing another villager who tells you not to ask questions with the same poison will net you a much larger payout, but will cost you a few reputation points. This was a pretty relaxing game and I'm glad I tried it out.

I played through a few demos seeing as I'm actually away from my main gaming computer for a while. So I had to whittle my list down to games that would work on my 11-year-old beater laptop. Also, I have a shitty little youtube channel that I just kind mess around on and I needed games to make videos out of, so Steam Next Fest helped me out there. Anyway, here's what I played:

Rog & Roll - I came across this game on twitter during a screenshot trend or game dev something or other and thought it looked neat. After following the twitter account, I added it to my Steam wishlist. Fast forward to last week, I saw this game had a demo available in the Next Fest event page, so it was the first demo I tried out. Overall, I am actually very impressed with it. I believe it's a solo or 2-person dev team making it and it's a good-looking, good-feeling platformer. There's an inventory system that hold items that seem to assist you in the game, but I wouldn't call them power-ups. One-time use items that can clear the screen and things like that. I honestly forgot to use them after finding out about them. I played the game pretty raw. Some of the hit detection did seem a little iffy sometimes to me, but I also can't fault too many technical issues on the game until I play it on something more powerful. It might be my laptop struggling to simultaneously play the game and record the gameplay. The video I made on it lasted longer than I thought it would because the game actually increased the difficulty more than I thought it would. I'm looking forward to playing the full game.

Hyper Echelon - A shmup that I decided to try out solely based on the art style. The art just had a really clean, sharp look to it. And again, it seemed like it would run on my old laptop, so I gave it a go. However, I'm not entirely sure how to describe the kind of game it is. It might be a roguelite, but it might not? Basically, you beat levels to earn medals that unlock more levels. You can replay any level and improve your performance to earn more medals. You also keep whatever gold pieces (GP, get it?) you earn for every run, successful or not. The GP is used to unlock upgrades to your ship's armor, cannon, bomb, shield, etc. The game supports co-op via a Wingman character, one of which I unlocked in the demo. Playing single-player, you control both characters with the Wingman just following along as you control your main ship. I didn't get to try out co-op since I'm alone right now, but I think it'd add a layer of fun. It also might make the game a bit easier. I found it to be sort of tough as it went on, but I don't know if you're expected to "grind out" some upgrades which I didn't do. Ultimately, I didn't complete this demo, but I did enjoy what I played.

Tiny Thor - A cool, little platformer game that I was interested in after watching the trailer. The Mjölnir mechanic seemed neat. Also, great pixel art. Playing through the demo, I realized it reminded me of computer platformers of the 90s, not so much console platformers. There's a certain style I can't put my finger on that differentiated the two. Though I will say, aiming the hammer to bounce around gives off some Yoshi's Island egg throw vibes. Recalling the hammer back is just fun to do as well. Anyway, the demo was pretty short overall, but I'm interested in how far they take the mechanic in the full game.

Norco - Minimal time playing this one. I don't think I've ever really played a point-and-click adventure-y type game like this before. Something about the art and the vibe made me want to try it. I only played it for about 15-20 min. I really enjoyed it. I might try to make it my first one of these when it comes out.

And that's about it. I really enjoyed the event. I hope Steam does it ever year as a way to showcase smaller games with demos that might not otherwise see the light of day. I'm also somewhat grateful for only having a junky laptop with me because it forced me to try stuff out I don't think I would have looked at. All of these games don't have pages in the wiki for example and none of my friends knew about any of them when I asked.